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Category Archives: Network

It’s been long time since the last post… But time came that I’ve faced serious problem when trying to change MAC address of my USB LAN adapter.

As recommended by numerous pages found by googling change MAC address Linux, I’ve tried ifconfig eth0 hw ether NEWMAC and macchanger. It changed MAC of my devices (as seen in ifconfig output), yet after plugging the LAN cable, the MAC was automatically restored to permanent one.

At first, I thought it’s the fault of NetworkManager, so I’ve stopped it. But the problem still persisted. After some tinkering, I’ve realised, the MAC can be specified also in NetworkManager alone by adding to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf two lines:

[connection]
ethernet.cloned-mac-address=NEWMAC

and restarting NetworkManager

sudo service network-manager restart

Note, when I’ve changed MAC in NetworkManager using GUI, the permanent MAC was also restored upon LAN cable connection.

Lately, I’ve spent quite a lot of time playing with my Kindle. The motivation was mostly its sloppiness – after having it for 1.5 year, my Kindle became very slow and unresponsive… I decided to factory reset it. And while doing it, I’ve checked if I maybe the jailbreak of newer firmware is possible (last time I’ve checked over a year ago it wasn’t).
To my big joy, I found these days it’s fairly easy to jailbreak any kindle by downgrading it’s firmware.
But this isn’t the focus of this post. Here I would like to share my experience with enabling ssh access to my Kindle. Why anyone would do that? Kindle is ARM-processor powered computer with Linux installed. So having SSH access, you can setup your Kindle to do lots of useful stuff. But about that, I’ll write in the next posts 😉
Here is how to proceed:

Initially, I had problem with streaming sound along with video. Adding, `:input-slave=alsa:// :v4l2-standard=1` solved this. You can try another values for `:v4l2-standard` ie. 0, 1 or 2, depending which microphone you want to use.

Above command will stream HD video (1280×720) in .ogg format (natively suported by most browsers) @ ~2Mbps (2000kbps). If you have slower connection, you can change `vb=2000` to `vb=1000` (~1Mbps) and play with lower resolutions. You can check available resolutions of your camera by:

lsusb -v | egrep -B10 'Width|Height'

This stream, however, is available to everyone. To limit it only to localhost, you can use iptables:

In the rural regions there is limited choice for Internet service providers (ISP). In my region, there is only one choice for cable connection… Therefore, I have decided to try widely advertised LTE. I have chosen one of the providers based on the closest LTE stations.

The real speed (20Mbps / 4Mbps) is far from the advertised 150Mbps, but it’s way better than my current cable connection (10Mbps / 1Mbps). Unfortunately, the station is some 3km away. I have obtained 30Mbps / 4.3Mbps by placing the modem outdoor, but this seems to be max in my region.

But still, the problem with data transfer limit remains… Hopefully, the competition between LTE providers will withdraw those limits as it happened in the early years with ADSL providers.

I’ve expanded my home network with new switch and I wanted to test the connection speed between different computers. At first, I ran rsync, but I’ve quickly realised it’s limited by source/destination read/write speeds.
I found better way of measuring connection speed using netcat: